In Which The Fish Tank Remains Intact and Jessica Day Is Shattered
by crumpledpaper33
Summary: "Old Nick would probably have taken things more slowly, but there was no accounting for Trench Coat Nick's actions. " A more ... satisfying ... ending for Quick Hardening Caulk. Spoilers through that episode. Enjoy! And please leave feedback!


"Take off your clothes! I mean it – take them off!" he yelled at her loudly.

Wait, had that actually just come out of his mouth? This, from the guy Caroline finally broke up with because he was too passive in every way? Ordering women to strip was _not_ his style, if you could even call what he had going a "style:" drifting aimlessly into relationships, never having the guts to tell his girlfriends how he felt, always drawn to strong-willed women who were more than happy to lead him by the nose.

But something was making him do crazy-ass things lately, like grabbing Jess and kissing her in the hallway after they'd played True American a few weeks ago. He hadn't given a second's thought to what a terrible idea that was, or even to the very real fact that Sam was waiting for Jess in her bed, just a few feet away on the other side of a pretty thin door. There had been none of his usual angst that night, none of his characteristic inertia, just pure action. It was like he was Trench Coat Nick all the time now, only without the trench coat - and he knew the Jess was the reason behind it.

So, apparently, he'd just yelled at his roommate to take her clothes off - and the _really_ crazy thing was, she was actually doing it. She may have gasped and swallowed hard when he said it, but she'd already dropped her black jacket to the floor and was now unbuttoning her red blouse, slowly walking toward him at the same time, never once breaking his gaze.

He stood still watching her, two thoughts hitting him simultaneously and with equal force: _Holy shit, we're really going to do this_. And _Please God, don't let me fuck this up_.

Following her lead, he threw off his shirt and walked toward her, the two of them falling on each other and resuming the frantic kissing that had started all this, when he dared her to "prove" she wasn't a gold digger - another example of bravado he didn't know he possessed. It was crazy how good she felt in his arms, his naked chest pressed against her warm, bra-clad torso. He buried his fingers in her silky, fragrant hair and ran kisses around her ear and down her neck until she started to make little moaning noises he'd never heard from her before.

His knees started to feel weak – he'd always thought that was just a dumb expression until now - and suddenly he needed to get them both onto the table he'd just violently cleared off. She let out a surprised little squeak as he swept her into his arms and gently deposited her on top of it. Even while they continued to kiss, he somehow managed to work her shorts off her legs but her black tights proved too much for him; after several fumbling attempts, he gave up trying and let her do it herself.

While she turned away from him to peel them off, he thought of the lingerie she'd sometimes line-dry on the shower rod in the bathroom, little scraps of lilac, red or pink lace that Nick always tried hard - very hard - not to see in the mirror's reflection while he shaved or brushed his teeth. (Her lingerie drove Schmidt crazy for a different reason: "Jessica, must I remind you _again_ that this is _not _a tenement house? My forebears did _not_ claw their way up from the slums of the Lower East Side so that their wildly successful descendant could be surrounded by the dripping wet laundry of others. _Get yourself a drying rack_ like all civilized people!") But when Jess turned back to Nick there was no lacy thong, just creamy thighs offset by a modest cotton bikini covered with yellow smiley faces, faces glowing faintly green in the dim blue light coming from Schmidt's fish tank.

Nick was pretty sure he'd never seen anything more erotic in his life.

Old Nick would probably have taken things more slowly, but there was no accounting for Trench Coat Nick's actions. He pulled Jess forcefully to the edge of the table, dropped to his knees and moved his head between her legs toward the little faces smiling up at him invitingly.

"Whoa, there, cowboy!" Jess said suddenly, struggling to sit up and pushing Nick's head away. "Um, I'm not so sure about that."

_Shit_. He'd prayed not to screw this up and somehow had already managed to before they'd even gotten anywhere. He'd obviously totally misread the situation in some critical way, mucking things up as usual. _Fuck_. _Fuck. FUCK._ "Jess, I'm sorry," he mumbled dolefully. "Really, I didn't mean to . . ." She interrupted him, looking uncomfortable. "No, no, it's not you, it's just . . ." She started to speak again and then hesitated. CeCe, who treated sex like an all-you-can-eat buffet – every kind of offering to be sampled and enjoyed guiltlessly – could never understand this particular hang-up of hers. Finally she said, "It's just - that's just never really done much for me."

He looked up at her, his brow furrowed in surprise. Maybe he was no stud like Sam, maybe he was sometimes even a little clumsy in bed, sure, but if there was one thing he'd learned in the years since he first fucked Lisa McCreery in the eleventh grade, it was that girls liked oral sex_. A lot_. He considered this particular act his ace in the hole, so to speak.

He couldn't resist ribbing her a little: "_Who_ are these guys you've been dating, Jess?"

"Hey, that's not fair!" she said defensively, though it suddenly seemed all wrong to be discussing with Nick the sexual prowess (or lack thereof) of her past boyfriends. She and Nick used to trade dating war stories, coming home late on a Saturday night and comparing notes over beers on the couch, even jokingly alluding to their sexual escapades. But now that they were - well, whatever it was they were to each other these days - now that he was standing shirtless over her, an obvious erection straining his faded blue jeans, the old rules didn't seem to apply.

Jess sighed and tried a new tack: "It's like caviar, you know what I mean?" "Um, no," Nick said, shaking his head in confusion. "I'm not really following the fish egg analogy here, no." Jess grew exasperated. "Like, I _know _I'm supposed to like it! It's the greatest thing ever – OK, I _get_ it! No one can _stop talking_ about how much they like it! But," she said, her voice getting smaller, "for whatever reason, I never have. So let's just move on."

He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment. He wasn't sure what he expected from Sexual Jess – hell, he'd spent the last few weeks trying to think of anything _but_ Jess in a sexual way, taking so many cold showers that Schmidt started bugging him about the water bill - but he never would have predicted shyness or insecurity. In a weird way, it emboldened him, making him feel even more Trench-Coat-Nick than before.

"Jess," he said, "Where's your iPhone?"

She gaped at him. "My iPhone? _My iPhone_? I tell you this super-personal thing, I make myself _completely_ vulnerable to you, and now seems like a good time for you to make a _call_? Are you frigging _kidding _me, Miller?"

"Just shut up and tell me where you put your _damn phone_!" he roared back. Still staring at him in disbelief, she gestured wordlessly to her black jacket lying on the floor. He retrieved the phone from the inner pocket and walked back to the table, momentarily distracted by the phone's cover of pink plastic and what looked like glued-on, glitter-dipped seashells_. Seashells_?

"Here's what we're gonna do," he said. "Give me five minutes and then if you want me to stop, I'll stop, OK? Hell, forget that -_three _minutes," he said, handing the phone back to her and showing her the digital stop watch he'd set on the phone.

She looked at him for a minute, a cryptic expression on her face, and then shrugged. "Fine, Miller, have it your way. But just don't take failure personally." She adopted a goofy, deeper male announcer voice, intoning: "Many have tried and few . . . . " She frowned. "Wait, that came out wrong. There haven't been _that _many, I mean, not when you consider that I'm almost thirty years old and -"

"Jess, will you please shut up? I'm on the clock here, OK?"

She lay back on her elbows reluctantly, every muscle in her body obviously tensed, as Nick moved in to kiss the white cotton. But the second his lips grazed her, she immediately jerked away and started laughing. Nick looked up, frowning. "I'm _sorry_!" she said. "I can't help it. That tickled!" Settling herself back down on the table, she arranged her face into a mock serious expression and cleared her throat. "OK, I'm ready now. Really. Try it again." Nick looked at her suspiciously, then bent down over her but before he'd even touched her, she'd squirmed away again, now laughing uncontrollably.

Nick stood up from his crouching position and walked away from the table, running his hands through his thick hair, then he returned to the table as though he'd come to some sort of decision. Instead of crouching between her legs, he lowered himself slowly over her, his forearms braced on either side of her body. Their faces were nearly touching now and his brown eyes, so close to her own, seemed darker than she'd ever seen them before, his expression deadly serious yet totally unreadable.

They stayed like that for a few seconds as the mood between them shifted perceptibly. Jess had now quieted down completely and was looking up at him questioningly. "You're going to lie still and let me do this to you, OK?" he asked softly, almost tenderly, but in a way that somehow turned the question into a statement of fact. She nodded mutely, blue eyes wide. When did Nick Miller, he of the sloppy hoodies and irrational fear of fish, become so . . . _commanding_?

Standing over her, never breaking his gaze at her face, he slowly drew her panties down and off her legs. He kneeled down again, but this time he pushed down on her hips so firmly with his hands that she couldn't move even if she wanted to. And she did want to at first, squirming impotently against his strong grip as he brought his mouth to her. He wouldn't let up, though, and slowly, slowly, he could feel her starting to relax against him, her breath slowing down and becoming heavier.

For a long while, there was no sound in the loft except Jess's increasingly rapid, jagged breathing, the occasional soft groans Nick couldn't help emitting (I'm doing _this_. To _Jess_. On our _table_.) and the gentle, hypnotic burbling of the water in Schmidt's fish tank.

But as soon as she was able to relax against Nick's mouth, Jess started to feel a new kind of tension. Now with each rasp of his tongue, her toes were curling, her thighs tensing and her fingers clenching and opening reflexively. Her thoughts, which at first had distracted her from feeling anything (_This table is way too hard. This situation is totally surreal. What if Winston and Schmidt came in right now?_), were now starting to run together in a jumbled stream: _Oh-my-god-so-this-is-what-the-fuss-is-all-about-I- have-to-remember-to-call-CeCe-tomorrow-how-does-he -do-that-with-his-tongue-oh-my-god-are-those-his-f ingers-inside-me-holy-shit _- until eventually all thought was obliterated by pure sensation.

A loud ringtone – Marimba - broke the quiet.

Nick raised his head in surprise. Jess emitted a low, pained groan. The phone, hurled blindly by Jess from her prone position on the table, suddenly whizzed past Nick's face, coming so close to hitting him that he actually felt its breeze as it flew by. It landed with a loud _thwack _against the wooden corner of the fish tank's base, then skittered across the floor for several feet before coming to a stop at Winston's canvas gym bag. The Marimba ring tone continued for a few more seconds, then died out pitifully.

For a second they stared at each other in stunned silence.

Slowly, a self-satisfied grin crossed Nick's face. "Um, you know you're gonna need a new phone, right?" "Shut UP, Miller!" she panted, "Don't stop!" "So, just to be clear here," he taunted her, smiling, "you're pretty much begging me now to do that thing you thought you didn't like?" "God, Miller, I really _hate_ you, you know that?"

He laughed softly and lowered his head. The shock of his warm mouth returning to her air-cooled skin only intensified her excitement, and she began moaning loudly and bucking her hips in earnest. He had the passing thought that, despite his raging hard-on, he could do this all night, maybe do this forever, and be totally satisfied just listening to the erotic sounds that were escaping her lips.

But he didn't need all night because suddenly Jess was crying out, almost screaming really, and gasping his name over and over again: "God, Nick, Nick, oh my god, _Nicholas_."

Nick rose from the floor and looked down at her on the table, hair spread wildly around her face, black mascaraed lashes resting on flushed cheeks that shone with sweat. Then her eyes opened and she gave him a smile that somehow combined shock, bashfulness and pure satisfied-Jess-languor.

He felt . . . it was hard to put it into words. _Triumphant,_ maybe, but that sounded asshole-ish, even to him. All he knew was, _he'd _made her feel this way. Nick Miller. Failed law student, fixer of sinks, passable bartender . . . roomfriend of Jess. And he was determined to make feel her this way again and again and again, until - if his past relationships were any guide - one day she wouldn't let him anymore.

The thought that eventually this would all be over, that Jess wouldn't be his to love any more (_crap, did he actually just say "love," even in the privacy of his own head?) _stabbed him right in the gut. But then, as he gathered up her languid body up in his arms and walked her to his bedroom door, he had another thought. Maybe if Trench Coat Nick continued to stick around, that horrible day might not come?

A guy could dream anyway.

- fin -


End file.
